WOULD YOU EVEN CARE IF HE WAS GUILTY?
The stock market is up, unemployment is down and the economy seems to be picking up some steam. The streets are mostly safe, the nation is mostly secure and the world is mostly at peace.
So does it matter to you whether or not the president is a crook? The answer for a lot of Americans may be no.
[ Everyone knows he's a crook, the question is he a traitor? ]
With the revelation that a grand jury is looking at evidence against members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign team, we move closer still to the possibility that someone could be in very big trouble.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his squad are moving fast, and the likelihood that some charges will be brought can no longer be ignored. It is not hard to imagine a moment in the very near future where some associate of the president is in the dock, charged with misdeeds relating to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
But, again, we ask: Would it matter to you?
Democrats are now in something of the same position as Bob Dole was in 1996 when he demanded of reporters about then-President Bill Clinton, “Where’s the outrage?”
Americans overwhelmingly believe that Russia meddled in the election – an action that in less ambiguous times would constitute an act of war. And an almost equally large number believe that Trump was to some degree complicit. But despite the day-by-day revelations, about a third of the country sticks with Trump.
The most recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 57 percent of respondents believe Trump was abusing the powers of office, 62 percent said he was not being honest and 58 percent said they thought he was interfering with the investigation.
But let’s dig a little deeper. While Trump’s job approval rating is at a new all-time low, he is still in the good graces of 76 percent of Republicans. That’s not so hot with one’s own party, a category in which presidents typically like to see numbers in the 80’s or 90’s. But still, 76 percent ain’t nothing.
That number matches up almost perfectly to the percentage of Republicans who believe Trump is not interfering. Heck, 30 percent of Republicans said they didn’t even think Russia interfered in the first place; and 70 percent of GOP respondents said they didn’t think Trump had done anything wrong at all.
That’s a pretty massive disconnect. Independent voters overwhelmingly agree Trump Russia interfered and Trump did wrong. While they are divided on the question of whether it constituted a criminal action or simply an unethical one, about 60 percent of unaffiliated voters say Trump did a bad thing vis-à-vis Russia.
You can attribute this disconnect to blind followership, “alternate facts,” or mind-boggling double talk from the administration. But there may be something else at work here: Many of Trump’s supporters wouldn’t care, even if they knew it was true.
One of the reasons the president has fallen back into the habit of demanding criminal prosecution of his vanquished 2016 foe is to force his supporters to climb back down the decision tree and ask themselves again whether they would rather have Hillary Clinton as president.
This is a version of what Trump did throughout the campaign. He would tacitly admit his ethical shortcomings but then cast them as positives – “tough,” “the smartest,” “a killer” – and then would go on to a harangue about the tar-thick corruption of the House of Clinton.
When Bill Clinton’s accusers were front and center at the second presidential debate, which was held in the wake of revelations of Trump’s previous banter about sexual assault, the women were props in Trump’s show. The message: “I’m no prince, but this guy’s a worse slime.”
Given the degree to which Republicans for generations have come to loathe the Clintons, who always seemed to be getting away with the worst of their misconduct, it was a pretty convincing argument in a binary election.
As the borscht gets deeper for the Trump administration on matters Russian, it is understandable that Trump wishes to revisit the choice of 2016.
The approach is less effective now, of course, because we know that Hillary Clinton won’t become president, no matter what. There will be no do-over on the election, and she couldn’t even win her own party’s nomination if she ran again (again!) in three years. If Trump stops being president, it will be the gentleman from Indiana who succeeds him, not the lady from New York.
For core supporters, though, it still does the trick – albeit in a different way.
As we hear Trump devotees wail that colluding with a hostile foreign power isn’t a crime or cavil that Mueller & Co. might find other crimes unrelated to Russian disruption, what we are really hearing is their acceptance of wrongdoing. This is the big: “So what?”
The underlying argument is that she probably did something even worse, so if he lied, cheated and maybe even stole the election. For after all, he would have been only beating Democrats at their own game.
Even though this view represents a minority of a minority, it is still pretty strong evidence of an unwell national civic culture. It is also like money in the bank for Trump.
As Trump told adoring fans in West Virginia, “They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership that you want with a fake story.”
We hate to have to keep harkening back to the impeachment of Bill Clinton, but the parallels are too overwhelming to ignore. And in that case, Democrats essentially came to accept that everything they once denied as a right-wing conspiracy was true but that they just didn’t care that it was so.
Plus, with peace and prosperity reigning across the land, who wanted to yank the president out of office? The unthinkable became thinkable.
That’s what Trump needs. As Mueller and his fellow G-men close in on their quarry, the willful blindness of partisans won’t be enough to keep Republicans from turning against Trump in numbers large enough to put his job at risk.
But if there is a sense that removing or even further isolating the president could jeopardize a growing economy, folks will tend to get a lot more lenient in their thinking.
That’s why we revisit this thought experiment from time to time. If we imagine that all that has been said and accused is true, would enough Republicans care enough to want Trump out?
Certainly the passing of time helps the president as voters get accustomed to a new reality that would have shocked them before. But also the condition of the country and its economy matters too.
And since whatever is revealed will almost certainly fall short of the most hysterical claims of Trump’s foes, it may not even take an economic boom to keep at least the overwhelming majority of Republicans on board.
It will be somewhere between hard and impossible for Trump to be a transformative president with a 33 percent approval rating. His political capital line of credit is far overextended. But it might be enough if the goal is basically to survive.
And that’s why Trump and his fellow Republicans feel extra pressure to pass some kind of economic stimulus soon. Tax cuts may be a matter of survival
foxnews.com
"Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.
The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.
This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin."
That his campaign took this meeting without contacting the FBI tells you the campaign was willing to commit treason to win.
Many Republicans have boarded the Trump Treason Train to Hell. |
